Five Reasons
to Stop Saying "Good Job!"
By Alfie
Kohn
NOTE: An
abridged version of this article was published in Parents magazine in May 2000 with
the title "Hooked on Praise." For a more detailed look at the issues
discussed here -- as well as a comprehensive list of citations to relevant
research -- please see the books Punished by Rewards and Unconditional Parenting.
Hang out at
a playground, visit a school, or show up at a child’s birthday party, and
there’s one phrase you can count on hearing repeatedly: "Good job!"
Even tiny infants are praised for smacking their hands together ("Good
clapping!"). Many of us blurt out these judgments of our children to the
point that it has become almost a verbal tic.
Plenty of
books and articles advise us against relying on punishment, from spanking to
forcible isolation ("time out"). Occasionally someone will even ask
us to rethink the practice of bribing children with stickers or food. But
you’ll have to look awfully hard to find a discouraging word about what is
euphemistically called positive reinforcement.
Lest there
be any misunderstanding, the point here is not to call into question the importance
of supporting and encouraging children, the need to love them and hug them and
help them feel good about themselves. Praise, however, is a different story
entirely. Here's why.
1.
Manipulating children. Suppose you offer a verbal reward to reinforce the behavior of a
two-year-old who eats without spilling, or a five-year-old who cleans up her
art supplies. Who benefits from this? Is it possible that telling kids they’ve
done a good job may have less to do with their emotional needs than with our convenience?
Rheta
DeVries, a professor of education at the University of Northern Iowa, refers to
this as "sugar-coated control." Very much like tangible rewards – or,
for that matter, punishments – it’s a way of doing something to children
to get them to comply with our wishes. It may be effective at producing this
result (at least for a while), but it’s very different from working with
kids – for example, by engaging them in conversation about what makes a
classroom (or family) function smoothly, or how other people are affected by
what we have done -- or failed to do. The latter approach is not only more
respectful but more likely to help kids become thoughtful people.
The reason
praise can work in the short run is that young children are hungry for our approval.
But we have a responsibility not to exploit that dependence for our own
convenience. A "Good job!" to reinforce something that makes our
lives a little easier can be an example of taking advantage of children’s
dependence. Kids may also come to feel manipulated by this, even if they can’t
quite explain why.
2. Creating
praise junkies. To be sure,
not every use of praise is a calculated tactic to control children’s behavior.
Sometimes we compliment kids just because we’re genuinely pleased by what they’ve
done. Even then, however, it’s worth looking more closely. Rather than
bolstering a child’s self-esteem, praise may increase kids’ dependence on us.
The more we say, "I like the way you…." or "Good
______ing," the more kids come to rely on our evaluations, our
decisions about what’s good and bad, rather than learning to form their own
judgments. It leads them to measure their worth in terms of what will lead us
to smile and dole out some more approval.
Mary Budd
Rowe, a researcher at the University of Florida, discovered that students who
were praised lavishly by their teachers were more tentative in their responses,
more apt to answer in a questioning tone of voice ("Um, seven?").
They tended to back off from an idea they had proposed as soon as an adult
disagreed with them. And they were less likely to persist with difficult tasks
or share their ideas with other students.
In short,
"Good job!" doesn’t reassure children; ultimately, it makes them feel
less secure. It may even create a vicious circle such that the more we slather
on the praise, the more kids seem to need it, so we praise them some more.
Sadly, some of these kids will grow into adults who continue to need someone
else to pat them on the head and tell them whether what they did was OK. Surely
this is not what we want for our daughters and sons.
3. Stealing
a child’s pleasure. Apart from
the issue of dependence, a child deserves to take delight in her
accomplishments, to feel pride in what she’s learned how to do. She also
deserves to decide when to feel that way. Every time we say, "Good
job!", though, we’re telling a child how to feel.
To be sure,
there are times when our evaluations are appropriate and our guidance is
necessary -- especially with toddlers and preschoolers. But a constant stream
of value judgments is neither necessary nor useful for children’s development.
Unfortunately, we may not have realized that "Good job!" is just as
much an evaluation as "Bad job!" The most notable feature of a
positive judgment isn’t that it’s positive, but that it’s a judgment. And
people, including kids, don’t like being judged.
I cherish
the occasions when my daughter manages to do something for the first time, or
does something better than she’s ever done it before. But I try to resist the
knee-jerk tendency to say, "Good job!" because I don’t want to dilute
her joy. I want her to share her pleasure with me, not look to me for a
verdict. I want her to exclaim, "I did it!" (which she often does)
instead of asking me uncertainly, "Was that good?"
4. Losing
interest. "Good
painting!" may get children to keep painting for as long as we keep
watching and praising. But, warns Lilian Katz, one of the country’s leading
authorities on early childhood education, "once attention is withdrawn,
many kids won’t touch the activity again." Indeed, an impressive body of
scientific research has shown that the more we reward people for doing
something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to
get the reward. Now the point isn’t to draw, to read, to think, to create – the
point is to get the goody, whether it’s an ice cream, a sticker, or a
"Good job!"
In a
troubling study conducted by Joan Grusec at the University of Toronto, young
children who were frequently praised for displays of generosity tended to be
slightly less generous on an everyday basis than other children were.
Every time they had heard "Good sharing!" or "I’m so proud of
you for helping," they became a little less interested in sharing or
helping. Those actions came to be seen not as something valuable in their own
right but as something they had to do to get that reaction again from an adult.
Generosity became a means to an end.
Does praise
motivate kids? Sure. It motivates kids to get praise. Alas, that’s often at the
expense of commitment to whatever they were doing that prompted the praise.
5. Reducing
achievement. As if it
weren’t bad enough that "Good job!" can undermine independence,
pleasure, and interest, it can also interfere with how good a job children
actually do. Researchers keep finding that kids who are praised for doing well
at a creative task tend to stumble at the next task – and they don’t do as well
as children who weren’t praised to begin with.
Why does
this happen? Partly because the praise creates pressure to "keep up the
good work" that gets in the way of doing so. Partly because their interest
in what they’re doing may have declined. Partly because they become less likely
to take risks – a prerequisite for creativity – once they start thinking about
how to keep those positive comments coming.
More
generally, "Good job!" is a remnant of an approach to psychology that
reduces all of human life to behaviors that can be seen and measured.
Unfortunately, this ignores the thoughts, feelings, and values that lie behind
behaviors. For example, a child may share a snack with a friend as a way of
attracting praise, or as a way of making sure the other child has enough to
eat. Praise for sharing ignores these different motives. Worse, it actually
promotes the less desirable motive by making children more likely to fish for
praise in the future.
*
Once you
start to see praise for what it is – and what it does – these constant little
evaluative eruptions from adults start to produce the same effect as
fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. You begin to root for a child to
give his teachers or parents a taste of their own treacle by turning around to
them and saying (in the same saccharine tone of voice), "Good
praising!"
Still, it’s
not an easy habit to break. It can seem strange, at least at first, to stop
praising; it can feel as though you’re being chilly or withholding something.
But that, it soon becomes clear, suggests that we praise more because we
need to say it than because children need to hear it. Whenever that’s true,
it’s time to rethink what we’re doing.
What kids do
need is unconditional support, love with no strings attached. That’s not just
different from praise – it’s the opposite of praise. "Good
job!" is conditional. It means we’re offering attention and
acknowledgement and approval for jumping through our hoops, for doing things
that please us.
This point,
you’ll notice, is very different from a criticism that some people offer to the
effect that we give kids too much approval, or give it too easily. They
recommend that we become more miserly with our praise and demand that kids
"earn" it. But the real problem isn’t that children expect to be
praised for everything they do these days. It’s that we’re tempted to
take shortcuts, to manipulate kids with rewards instead of explaining and
helping them to develop needed skills and good values.
So what’s
the alternative? That depends on the situation, but whatever we decide to say
instead has to be offered in the context of genuine affection and love for who
kids are rather than for what they’ve done. When unconditional support is
present, "Good job!" isn’t necessary; when it’s absent, "Good
job!" won’t help.
If we’re
praising positive actions as a way of discouraging misbehavior, this is
unlikely to be effective for long. Even when it works, we can’t really say the
child is now "behaving himself"; it would be more accurate to say the
praise is behaving him. The alternative is to work with the child, to
figure out the reasons he’s acting that way. We may have to reconsider our own
requests rather than just looking for a way to get kids to obey. (Instead of
using "Good job!" to get a four-year-old to sit quietly through a
long class meeting or family dinner, perhaps we should ask whether it’s reasonable
to expect a child to do so.)
We also need
to bring kids in on the process of making decisions. If a child is doing
something that disturbs others, then sitting down with her later and asking,
"What do you think we can do to solve this problem?" will likely be
more effective than bribes or threats. It also helps a child learn how to solve
problems and teaches that her ideas and feelings are important. Of course, this
process takes time and talent, care and courage. Tossing off a "Good
job!" when the child acts in the way we deem appropriate takes none of
those things, which helps to explain why "doing to" strategies are a
lot more popular than "working with" strategies.
And what can
we say when kids just do something impressive? Consider three possible
responses:
* Say
nothing. Some people
insist a helpful act must be "reinforced" because, secretly or
unconsciously, they believe it was a fluke. If children are basically evil,
then they have to be given an artificial reason for being nice (namely, to get
a verbal reward). But if that cynicism is unfounded – and a lot of research
suggests that it is – then praise may not be necessary.
* Say what
you saw. A simple,
evaluation-free statement ("You put your shoes on by yourself" or
even just "You did it") tells your child that you noticed. It also
lets her take pride in what she did. In other cases, a more elaborate
description may make sense. If your child draws a picture, you might provide
feedback – not judgment – about what you noticed: "This mountain is huge!"
"Boy, you sure used a lot of purple today!"
If a child
does something caring or generous, you might gently draw his attention to the
effect of his action on the other person: "Look at Abigail’s face!
She seems pretty happy now that you gave her some of your snack." This is
completely different from praise, where the emphasis is on how you feel
about her sharing
* Talk less,
ask more. Even better
than descriptions are questions. Why tell him what part of his drawing
impressed you when you can ask him what he likes best about it?
Asking "What was the hardest part to draw?" or "How did you
figure out how to make the feet the right size?" is likely to nourish his
interest in drawing. Saying "Good job!", as we’ve seen, may have
exactly the opposite effect.
This doesn’t
mean that all compliments, all thank-you’s, all expressions of delight are
harmful. We need to consider our motives for what we say (a genuine
expression of enthusiasm is better than a desire to manipulate the child’s
future behavior) as well as the actual effects of doing so. Are our
reactions helping the child to feel a sense of control over her life -- or to
constantly look to us for approval? Are they helping her to become more excited
about what she’s doing in its own right – or turning it into something she just
wants to get through in order to receive a pat on the head
It’s not a
matter of memorizing a new script, but of keeping in mind our long-term goals
for our children and watching for the effects of what we say. The bad news is
that the use of positive reinforcement really isn’t so positive. The good news
is that you don’t have to evaluate in order to encourage.
Copyright ©
2001 by Alfie Kohn. This article may be downloaded, reproduced, and distributed
without permission as long as each copy includes this notice along with
citation information (i.e., name of the periodical in which it originally
appeared, date of publication, and author's name). Permission must be obtained
in order to reprint this article in a published work or in order to offer it
for sale in any form. Please write to the address indicated on the Contact page
at www.alfiekohn.org.
www.alfiekohn.org -- © Alfie Kohn
http://www.alfiekohn.org/parenting/gj.htm
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